Mouseless Browsing Using Firefox

If you are good with you Keyboard, then Sometimes you must have felt to make shortcuts for everything and just not to use mouse at all. We know hoe it feels to take hands off the keyboard.
Well at least there is a way to browse the Internet without using the mouse at all. This is made possible by using Firefox and its tools.

Here’s What you need to do.

1. Open Firefox and go to Tools –> Options –> Advanced –> General.
2. Now in the general tab, second line would say “Search for text when i start typing”.



3. Click that box, and click on ok.
4. Now see the difference, you now just need to type the link you wanna go onto, you start typing that and it will be highlighted on your screen, you need to press enter to go to that link.

This is surely going to bring a broad smile on your face.

Customized Icons for Drives

Bored of your plain and uninterestingly looking icons of your drive? How can you make a private by just looking at it. Well, one of the ways is to give the drives your name. Another way is to give it a customized icon, or even your photo. Now, how is that possible? Here is easy tweak that will take you through the process of placing these icons for your drive. This same tweak will work for Flash drives, and Disks. Here are the steps you need to follow.

1. Choose any image and convert it into an “ICO” file.
2. Download this new “ICO” file and place it in the drive you want to assign this image to.
3. Now, open notepad, and type the following commands
   

   
   [autorun]
   ICON=filename.ico

4. Save this file as autorun.inf, and make this file and image as hidden.
5. You can hide this file by going into properties, and then selecting the Hidden box.
6. Reboot your computer and you will see the new icons into effect.

Thats it, Wasn’t it simple?It was. Do try this, and i am sure you will find a new PC

Does Your Drive Not Open on Double Click

One of our readers Sandeep mailed me and asked a question. “Whenever I double click on my D drive, it does not open. It shows me a find window and i am not able to access it. I am not able to access any type of data, What can be done.”
On Further probing, I came to know that whenever he double clicks, Find window opens up, and this was no result of a Virus attack, it was just playing with the Folder Options, which resulted in this situation.
He was able to see the “Find” option as the main option in bold, and also able to open drives through right click options. When I checked it, I saw that the Registry gets edited when we do the changes as Manish did.
Here is the solution to Manish’s Problem

1. Go to Start –> Run, Type Regedit
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Drive\shell
3. In the Right pane, Change the Only value there “Default” to “None“

This Solved the issue. If you are facing this problem too, you can try this and thus get your problem solved.

Changing Extension of Multiple Files

Suppose in case you have 100 video files, that too in a different formats and you want to change it to one common format, what’s the best thing you will do?
You will go in to folder options and untick “Hide extensions for known file types” and then change the extensions one by one?
Well if this is what you are going to do then i have a much simpler way of doing it.

Here’s what you need to do.

1. Go to start –> Run –> Cmd (for Xp) or Command (for 98).
2. Now on the command prompt, go onto the folder where all these videos are, or where your data is(like “d:\videos>”).
3. Type in “ren *.* *.mpeg” without quotes. Its just an example on how to rename files. You can select any valid extension and all the files will be renamed in a very little time.

Try this and you are going to love it.

Speed Up Starting Of CD/DVD Burning Software

Whenever you Burn your data onto a CD/DVD, you might have noticed that it takes time to open the software. Either you use Nero or Roxio or any other software, it takes time to open. You can speed this process by making some changes in the services. Some of the services used by this software are not required and can be stopped. This will make the process much faster. Lets see how.

1. Go to Start –> Control Panel –> Administrative Tools –> Services.
2. Select IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service and Disable the Startup Type.
3. Click OK and Exit.

You will now see the difference. This makes the service much faster then your previous experience. However, if you are using the Windows XP CD/DVD burning service, then you might not see this service, and if you do then disabling this won’t have any effect.

Disabling Right Click on Desktop

After reading a small book on Registry, I have learned a lot. As you can see that some of my last posts have concentrated only on registry tweaks. Registry is a very powerful tool, and how it can be used in hacking and can be connected with Trojans and viruses is the major area of interest. Today, i completed this book, and i am not going to touch it again. I now need to study a bit of my MBA as well but lastly i was able to get one more tweak, which i was looking for, Disabling the right click on Desktop. Here is how you can perform it.

1. Go to Start –> Run, type Regedit.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer.
3. In the Right Panel, create a new DWORD value named “NoViewContextMenu” (Case-Sensitive), and give the value as “1“.
4. Give a reboot to your system, and it should be done.
5. To disable it, you need to change the value to “0“, or either you can delete the registry entry as well.

Hope you liked it.

BLOCKING USER TO SHUTDOWN PC

This tip is very interesting for home and some small office users, who wants to restrict user's ability to shutdown their computer. You can hide the Shutdown button from the Start menu using registry editor and also restrict access to shutdown .

Follow the given steps to hide system shutdown button from start menu:

*

To use this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with

administrative rights.

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Click Start button and type regedit in Run option then press Enter for next.
*

Here locate the location to:
*

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software

\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion \Policies\Explorer

*

Here in right side panel, right click to create a new DWORD value with name NoClose.
*

Now assign number 1 to its value data box.
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Now close the registry editor and restart your computer after any changes to go into effect.
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But next time, if you want to unhide the shutdown button then simply change the value data box to 0 or delete this DWORD item.
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Again close the registry editor and restart your computer after any changes to go into effect.

Use Word 2007 to Publish Posts On Your Blog

Yes this is true, Microsoft Word 2007 can be used to publish posts on your blogs. There is no plug-in or add-ons you need to install. Its one of the feature of Word only that allows you to connect to the internet and publish your posts. You can create and configure an account in word and start blogging. You can use it to publish your posts for Windows Live, Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress and others. After that you need to provide the details for your images, and its done.

Just follow these steps to create a blog post and configure your
account.

1. Click the Office button, and click new, choose the option “Blog Post”.
2. If you are opening it for the first time then it will automatically ask you for the configuration of an account, If not click on manage account, and click new.
3. Choose your Blog provider and provide the login details.
4. Then choose the image where you want to upload. You can choose to upload the images on your own server if your blog is a self hosted, choose “My Blog Provider” in case your blog provider gives you space to upload pics like blogger.
5. When you are done with writing, you can publish the post directly or else you can also make the post to publish as draft.

You can also create multiple accounts and if you are using blogger, then you can select the blog you want to post into.
This is one the great way by Microsoft to step into the blogosphere. Recently Microsoft also launched a blog writer for windows blog, but this new thing makes sure that blogosphere is reaching new heights, and even any big fish wants to come into this part of Internet.

Go and try this new tool, and leave your comments. If you find anything new.

Disabling Recent Files in Office 2007

By default, Word 2007 displays the last 17 documents that have been opened. Some users, like me, likes to increase this limit, but some use to reduce this limit to 0 and making the recent documents disabled. The number of recent can be increased or decreased, from 0 to 50. Disabling the number of recent documents in Word 2007 wont reduce the number of recent documents in Excel or PowerPoint. You need to go in every application to change this setting.

Follow these steps to perform the same.

1. Click On Office Button.
2. Go to Word Options.
3. Go to the Advanced tab, and look for Display section.
4. Look for “Show this number of Recent Documents” and fill your desired value from 0 to 50.

Click OK, and you are done with it.

Get Relief from your Messy Desktop

One of the big problems I face is the Desktop. My desktop was so terribly messy that last week I lost some of my files and I am still searching for it :(. Can you imagine, that even the best wallpaper could not save my desktop from looking ugly, no matter how beautiful it is, because its just not visible. Then I decided to use a freeware, but I was unable to find any, that met my requirements. I then put up all my data into different folders, but again, creating a mess. Accessing it regularly, and opening folders, browsing through them, its tiring.
To this, I found a solution which was much easier. I created a folder, and put all the data in the respective subfolders. This folder was then kept in one of my drives, and it was accessed from the taskbar. How? let me tell you that.

• Right click on “TaskBar“, go to “Toolbars“, and click “New Toolbar…“
• There you will see a window to select the folder. Just browse to the folder, and select it.
• You will see a Toolbar to access the contents of this folder.

I must tell you, this has really changed the way I used to work, apart from this, my system booting speed has improved.
Another way my friend advised me was to create shortcuts and access them through Run command. This is how you can perform this.

1. Create a shortcut on the desktop for the folder to be accessed
2. Rename it to a simple and short name, according to your requirements.
3. Cut and paste that shortcut in “c:/windows”, where c: drive is the Drive in which OS is installed.
4. Now go to run, type in the name of the folder you gave, and it should be in front of you.

I personally prefer the first method, as you have files in front of you, and any one selected file can be opened as well. But do try these, if you face the same problem as I do, and I hope I don’t loose files like this in future :).